InfoWorld's Neil McAllister questions whether slowing product development, legal woes, and rising bureaucracy will signal trying times ahead for Google. "With Google's rapid growth have come new challenges. It faces intense competition in all of its major markets, even as it enters new ones. Its newer initiatives have often struggled to reach profitability. It must answer multiple ongoing legal challenges, to say nothing of antitrust probes in the United States and Europe. Privacy advocates accuse it of running roughshod over individual rights. As a result, it's becoming more cautious and risk-averse. But worst of all, as it grows ever larger and more cumbersome, it may be losing its appeal to the highly educated, impassioned workers that power its internal knowledge economy." Note from Thom: Are Apple'sMicrosoft's Google's days behind it? I don't think you can call yourself a technology giant without a '[...] is dying'-article.

Google has never sued anyone with patent and/or trademark infringement, has never threatened anyone to do so, and has never shown any intention to do so, let alone to squash competition.

Yet again, your version of the facts do not match reality. Google like any holder has engaged in aggressive enforcement of its trademarks (both Google and Android) in order to combat infringement, dilution, and bad faith registrations. Even ChillingEffects has several C&D letters threatening legal action under several statutes and implementing economic sanctions at its disposal (removal from AdWords and Android Marketplace) in its database (search for Google as sender).

They, like most large organizations, have a dedicated Google Trademark Enforcement Team. Perhaps you could inform yourself with data rather than anecdotes and ask them for summaries of their C&D and actual filings over the past ten years or so: mailto:TM_enforce@google.com

I doubt they will bother to respond, but you never know. Or just keep ranting and raving, whatevs. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.

I don't really consider their actions in this regard problematic; not to aggresively protect their marks would be irresponsible to their shareholders, although the extent to which Google has gone to prevent generization of "googling" may border on "evil".